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own axis, only to return to their original meaning, pause there shortly and then enter into new unpredictable constellations. Nothing is codified and any meaning exists only as a collection of ephemeral associations with other meanings. Gary Hill's elaborate language games generate a reflexive cognitive space that awakens within the viewer the concept of an unending number of possible meanings.[15]

Dialogue experiments in the cinema, theater and television

Interactive films such as «Mörderische Entscheidung» by Oliver Hirschbiegel, a crime story that was broadcast in 1992 simultaneously on ARD and ZDF, work with narrative strategies using dialogue, focusing less on ambiguities than on new forms of involving the viewer. Hirschbiegel picks up the thread of early attempts at interactive cinema, such as could be viewed in 1967 in the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the World's Fair in Montreal. At that time, the film «One Man and his Jury» was stopped at certain points and audience members were able to determine the further course of the story using buttons on their armrests. At

the theater Nicolas Schöffer with Pierre Henry and Alwin Nikolais produced the multimedia «play» «Kyldex,» which premiered at the Hamburg State Opera in 1973. Before the performance, each viewer was provided with signaling discs of various colors with which they could influence what was happening on stage. «Kyldex» took the strategy one step further than the interactive film «One Man and his Jury,» since audience intervention caused the piece to be completely carved up into narrative fragments, out of which it was hardly possible anymore to reconstruct a causally motivated plot sequence. This process of audience participation, motivated in the 1960s and 1970s primarily by the testing of new forms of political codetermination, was developed further in the 1990s with Cinematrix Software. The system was presented as a prototype in 1991 at the SIGGRAPH in Las Vegas. In 1994 Loren and Rachel Carpenter used it for interactive games played by a large audience on a big screen at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Audience members were given signaling discs covered in red or green reflective foil, with which they could influence what took place on the projection screen or play